All Book Summaries
TIME REVOLUTION
But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. ANDREW MARVELL Almost everyone, whether ultra-busy or ultra-idle, needs a time revolution. It is not that we are short of time or even that we have too much of it. It is the way we treat time, even the way we think about it, that is the problem—and the opportunity. For those who have not experienced a time revolution, it is the fastest way to make a giant leap in both happiness and effectiveness. THE 80/20 PRINCIPLE AND TIME REVOLUTION The 80/20 Principle, when applied to our use of time, advances the following hypotheses: • Most of any individual's significant achievements—most of the value someone adds in professional, intellectual, artistic, cultural, or athletic terms—is achieved in a minority of their time. There is a profound imbalance between what is created and the time taken to create it, whether the time is measured in days, weeks, months, years, or a lifetime. • Similarly, most of an individual's happiness occurs during quite bounded periods of time. If happiness could be accurately measured, a large majority of it would register in a fairly small proportion of the total time and this would apply during most periods, whether the period measured was a day, a week, a month, a year, or a lifetime. We could rephrase these two ideas with spurious precision, but greater snappiness, using 80/20 shorthand: • 80 percent of achievement is attained in 20 percent of the time taken; conversely, 80 percent of time spent leads to only 20 percent of output value. • 80 percent of happiness is experienced in 20 percent of life; and 80 percent of time contributes only 20 percent of happiness. Remember that these are hypotheses to be tested against your experience, not self-evident truths or the results of exhaustive research. Where the hypotheses are true (as they are in a majority of cases I have tested), they have four rather startling implications: • Most of what we do is of low value. • Some small fragments of our time are much more valuable than all the rest. • If we can do anything about this, we should do something radical: there is no point tinkering around the edges or making out use of time a little more efficient. • If we make good use of only 20 percent of our time, there is no shortage of it! spend a few minutes or hours reflecting on whether the 80/20 principle operates for you in each of these spheres. It doesn’t matter what the exact percentages are and in any case it is almost impossible to measure them precisely. The key question is whether there is a major imbalance between the time spent on the one hand and achievement or happiness on the other. Does the most productive fifth of your time lead to four-fifths of valuable results? Are four-fifths of your happiest times concentrated into one-fifth of your life? These are important questions and should not be answered glibly. It might be an idea to set this book aside and go for a walk. Don’t come back until you have decided whether your use of time is unbalanced. THE POINT IS NOT TO MANAGE YOUR TIME BETTER! If your use of time is unbalanced, a time revolution is required. You don’t need to organize yourself better or alter your time allocation at the margins; you need to transform how you spend your time. You probably also need to change the way you think about time itself. What you need should not, however, be confused with time management. Time management originated in Denmark as a training device to help busy executives organize their time more effectively. It has now become a $1 billion industry operating throughout the world. The key characteristic of the time management industry now is not so much the training, but more the sale of “time managers,” executive personal organizers, both of the traditional paper-based type and now increasingly electronic. Time management also often comes with a strong evangelical pitch: the fastest-growing corporation in the industry, Franklin, has deep Mormon roots. Time management is not a fad, since its users are usually highly appreciative of the systems used, and they generally say that their productivity has risen by 15–25 percent as a result. But time management aims to fit a quart into a pint jar. It is about speeding up. It is specifically aimed at business people pressured by too many demands on their time. The idea is that better planning of each tiny segment of the day will help executives act more efficiently. Time management also advocates the establishment of clear priorities, to escape the tyranny of daily events that although very urgent, may not be all that important. Time management implicitly assumes that we know what is and is not a good use of our time. If the 80/20 Principle holds, this is not a safe assumption. In any case, if we knew what was important, we’d be doing it already. Time management often advises people to categorize their list of “to do” activities into A, B, C, or D priorities. In practice, most people end up classifying 60–70 percent of their activities as A or B priorities. They conclude that what they are really short of is time. This is why they were interested in time management to start with. So they end up with better planning, longer working hours, greater earnestness, and usually greater frustration too. They become addicted to time management, but it doesn’t fundamentally change what they do, or significantly lower their level of guilt that they are not doing enough. The name time management gives the game away. It implies that time can be managed more efficiently, that it is a valuable and scarce resource and that we must dance to its tune. We must be parsimonious with time. Given half a chance, it will escape from us. Time lost, the time management evangelists say, can never be regained. We now live in an age of busyness. The long-predicted age of leisure is taking an age to arrive, except for the unemployed. We now have the absurd situation noted by Charles Handy that working hours for executives are growing—60 hours a week are not unusual—at the same time as there is a worsening shortage of work to go round. Society is divided into those who have money but no time to enjoy it and those who have time but no money. The popularity of time management coexists with unprecedented anxiety about using time properly and having enough time to do one's job satisfactorily. 80/20 TIME HERESY The 80/20 Principle overturns conventional wisdom about time. The implications of 80/20 time analysis are quite different and, to those suffering from the conventional view of time, startlingly liberating. The 80/20 Principle asserts the following: Our current use of time is not rational. There is therefore no point in seeking marginal improvements in how we spend our time. We need to go back to the drawing board and overturn all our assumptions about time. There is no shortage of time. In fact, we are positively awash with it. We only make good use of 20 percent of our time. And for the most talented individuals, it is often tiny amounts of time that make all the difference. The 80/20 Principle says that if we doubled our time on the top 20 percent of activities, we could work a two-day/week and achieve 60 percent more than now. This is light years away from the frenetic world of time management. The 80/20 Principle treats time as a friend, not an enemy. Time gone is not time lost. Time will always come round again. This is why there are seven days in a week, twelve months in a year, why the seasons come round again. Insight and value are likely to come from placing ourselves in a comfortable, relaxed, and collaborative position toward time. It is our use of time, and not time itself, that is the enemy. The 80/20 Principle says that we should act less. Action drives out thought. It is because we have so much time that we squander it. The most productive time on a project is usually the last 20 percent, simply because the work has to be completed before a deadline. Productivity on most projects could be doubled simply by halving the amount of time for their completion. This is not evidence that time is in short supply. TIME IS THE BENIGN LINK BETWEEN THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE It is not shortage of time that should worry us, but the tendency for the majority of time to be spent in low-quality ways. Speed, ing up or being more "efficient" with our use of time will not help us; indeed, such ways of thinking are more the problem than the solution. 80/20 Thinking directs us to a more "eastern" view of time. Time should not be seen as a sequence, running from left to right as in nearly all graphical representations that the culture of business has, imposed on us. It is better to view time as a synchronizing and cyclical device, just as the inventors of the clock intended. Time keeps coming round, bringing with it the opportunity to learn, to deepen a few valued relationships, to produce a better product or outcome, and to add more value to life. We do not exist just in the present; we spring from the past and have a treasure trove of past associations; and our future, like our past, is already immanent in the present. A far better graphical representation of time in our lives than the left-to-right graph is a series of interlocked and ever larger and higher triangles, as shown in Figure 35. The effect of thinking about time in this way is that it highlights the need to carry with us, through our lives, the most precious and valued 20 percent of what we have—our personality, abilities, friendships, and even our physical assets—and ensure that they are nurtured, developed, extended, and deepened, to increase our effectiveness, value, and happiness. This can only be done by having consistent and continuous relationships, founded on optimism that the future will be better than the present, because we can take and extend the best 20 percent from the past and the present to create that better future. Viewed in this way, the future is not a random movie that we are halfway through, aware of (and terrified by) time whizzing past. Rather, the future is a dimension of the present and the past, giving us the opportunity to create something better. 80/20 Thinking insists that this is always possible. All we have to do is to give freertein and better direction to our most positive 20 percent.Figure 35 The time triad A PRIMER FOR TIME REVOLUTIONARIES Here are seven steps to detonating a time revolution. Make the difficult mental leap of dissociating effort and reward The Protestant work ethic is so deeply ingrained in everyone, of all religions and none, that we need to make a conscious effort to extirpate it. The trouble is that we do enjoy hard work, or at least the feeling of virtue that comes from having done it. What we must do is to plant firmly in our minds that hard work, especially for somebody else, is not an efficient way to achieve what we want. Hard work leads to low returns. Insight and doing what we ourselves want lead to high returns. Decide on your own patron saints of productive laziness. Mine are Ronald Reagan and Warren Buffett. Reagan made an effortless progression from B-film actor to darling of the Republican Right governor of California, and extremely successful president. What did Reagan have going for him? Good looks, a wonderfully mellifluous voice which he deployed instinctively on all the right occasions (the high point of which undoubtedly consisted in his words to Nancy when shot, “Honey, I forgot to duck”), some very astute campaign managers, old-fashioned grace, and a Disneyesque view of America and the world. Reagan’s ability to apply himself was limited at best, his grasp of conventional reality ever more tenuous, his ability to inspire the United States and destroy communism ever more awesome. To many Churchill’s dictum, never was so much achieved by so few with so little effort. Warren Buffett became (for a time) the richest man in the United States, not by working but by investing. Starting with very little capital, he has compounded it over many years at rates far above stock market average appreciation. He has done this with a limited degree of analysis (he started before slide rules were invented) but basically with a few insights which he has applied consistently. Buffett started his riches rollercoaster with one Big Idea: that U.S. local newspapers had a local monopoly that constituted the most perfect business franchise. This simple idea made him his first fortune, and much of his subsequent money has been made in shares in the media: an industry he understands. If not lazy, Buffett is very economical with his energy. Whereas most fund managers buy lots of stocks and churn them frequently, Buffett buys few and holds them for ages. This means that there is very little work to do. He pours scorn on the conventional view of investment portfolio diversification, which he has dubbed the Noah’s Ark method: “one buys two of everything and ends up with a zoo.” His own investment philosophy “borders on lethargy.” Whenever I am tempted to do too much, I remember Ronald Reagan and Warren Buffett. You should think of your own examples, of people you know personally or those in the public eye, who exemplify productive inertia. Think about them often. Give up guilt Giving up guilt is clearly related to the dangers of excessively hard work. But it is also related to doing the things you enjoy. There is nothing wrong with that. There is no value in doing things you don’t enjoy. Do the things that you like doing. Make them your job. Make your job them. Nearly everyone who has become rich has had the added bonus of becoming rich doing things they enjoy. This might be taken as yet another example of the universe’s 80/20 perversity. Twenty percent of people not only enjoy 80 percent of wealth but also monopolize 80 percent of the enjoyment to be had from work: and they are the same 20 percent! That curmudgeonly old Puritan John Kenneth Galbraith has drawn attention to a fundamental unfairness in the world of work. The middle classes not only get paid more for their work, but they have more interesting work and enjoy it more. They have secretaries, assistants, first-class travel, luxurious hotels, and more interesting working lives too. In fact, you would need to have a large private fortune to afford all the perquisites that senior industrialists now routinely award themselves. Galbraith has advanced the revolutionary view that those who have less interesting jobs should be paid more than those with jobs that are more fun. What a spoilsport! Such views are thought provoking, but no good will come of them. As with so many 80/20 phenomena, if you look beneath the surface you can detect a deeper logic behind the apparent inequity. In this case the logic is very simple. Those who achieve the most have to enjoy what they do. It is only by fulfilling oneself that anything of extraordinary value can be created. Think, for example, of any great artist in any sphere. The quality and quantity of the output are stunning. Van Gogh never stopped. Picasso ran an art factory long before Andy Warhol, because he loved what he did. Revel in Michelangelo’s prodigious, sexually driven, sublime output. Even the fragments that I can remember—his David, The Dying Slave, the Laurentian Library, the New Sacristy, the Sistine chapel ceiling, the Pietà in Saint Peter’s—are miraculous laws for one individual. Michelangelo did it all, not because it was his job, or because he feared the irascible Pope Julius II or even to make money, but because he loved his creations and young men. You may not have quite the same drives, but you will not create anything of enduring value unless you love creating it. This applies as much to purely personal as to business matters. I am not advocating perpetual laziness. Work is a natural activity that satisfies an intrinsic need, as the unemployed, retired, and those who make overnight fortunes rapidly discover. Everyone has their own natural balance, rhythm, and optimal work/play mix and most people can sense innately when they are being too lazy or industrious. 80/20 Thinking is most valuable in encouraging people to pursue high-value/satisfaction activities in both work and play periods, rather than in stimulating an exchange of work for play. But I suspect that most people try too hard at the wrong things. The modern world would greatly benefit if a lower quantity of work led to a greater profusion of creativity and intelligence. If much greater work would benefit the most idle 20 percent of our people, much less work would benefit the hardest-working 20 percent; and such arbitrage would benefit society both ways. The quantity of work is much less important than its quality, and its quality depends on self-direction. Free yourself from obligations imposed by others It is a fair bet that when 80 percent of time yields 20 percent of results, that 80 percent is undertaken at the behest of others. It is increasingly apparent that the whole idea of working directly for someone else, of having a job with security but limited discretion, has just been a transient phase (albeit one lasting two centuries) in the history of work. Even if you work for a large corporation, you should think of yourself as an independent business, working for yourself, despite being on Monolith Inc.’s payroll. The 80/20 Principle shows time and time again that the 20 per-cent who achieve the most either work for themselves or behave as if they do. The same idea applies outside work. It is very difficult to make good use of your time if you don’t control it. (It is actually quite difficult even if you do, since your mind is prisoner to guilt, convention, and other externally imposed views of what you should do—but at least you stand a chance of cutting these down to size.) It is impossible, and even undesirable, to take my advice too far. You will always have some obligations to others and these can be extremely useful from your perspective. Even the entrepreneur is not really a lone wolf, answerable to no one. He or she has partners, employees, alliances, and a network of contacts, from whom nothing can be expected if nothing is given. The point is to choose your partners and obligations extremely selectively and with great care. Be unconventional and eccentric in your use of time You are unlikely to spend the most valuable 20 percent of your time in being a good soldier, in doing what is expected of you, in attending the meetings that everyone assumes you will, in doing what most of your peers do, or in otherwise observing the social conventions of your role. In fact, you should question whether any of these things is necessary. You will not escape from the tyranny of 80/20—the likelihood that 80 percent of your time is spent on low-priority activities—by adopting conventional behavior or solutions. A good exercise is to work out the most unconventional or eccentric ways in which you could spend your time: how far you could deviate from the norm without being thrown out of your world. Not all eccentric ways of spending time will multiply your effectiveness, but some or at least one of them could. Draw up several scenarios and adopt the one that allows you the most time on high-value activities that you enjoy. Who among your acquaintances is both effective and eccentric? Find out how they spend their time and how it deviates from the norm. You may want to copy some of the things they do and don’t do. Identify the 20 percent that gives you 80 percent About a fifth of your time is likely to give you four-fifths of your achievement or results and four-fifths of your happiness. Since this may not be the same fifth (although there is usually considerable overlap), the first thing to do is to be clear about whether your objective, for the purposes of each run through, is achieving them or happiness. I recommend that you look at them both separately. For happiness, identify your happiness islands: the amounts of time, or the few years, that have contributed a disproportionate amount of your happiness. Take a clean sheet of paper, write “Happiness Islands” at the top and list as many of them as you can remember. Then try to deduce what is common between all or some of the happiness islands. Repeat the procedures for your unhappiness islands. These will not generally comprise the other 80 percent of your time, since (for most people) there is a large no-man’s-land of moderate happiness between the happiness and unhappiness islands. Yet it is important to identify the most significant causes of unhappiness and any common denominators between them. Repeat this whole procedure for achievement. Identify your achievement islands: the short periods when you have achieved a much higher ratio of value to time than during the rest of your week, month, year, or life. Head a clean sheet of paper with “Achievement Islands” and list as many as you can, if possible taken over the whole of your life. Try to identify the achievement islands’ common characteristics. Before leaving your analysis, you might want to glance at the list of the Top 10 highest-value uses of time on page 164. This is a general list compiled from many people’s experience and may nudge your memory. List separately your achievement desert islands. These are the periods of greatest sterility and lowest productivity. The list of the Top 10 low-value uses of time on page 163 may help you. Again, what do they tend to have in common? Now act accordingly. Multiply the 20 percent of your time that gives you 80 percent When you have identified your happiness and achievement islands, you are likely to want to spend more time on these and similar activities. When I explain this idea some people say there is a flaw in my logic, because spending more time on the top 20 percent may lead to diminishing returns setting in. Twice as much time on the top 20 percent may not lead to another 80 percent of output, perhaps only to another 40, 50, 60, or 70 percent. I have two replies to this point. First, since it is impossible (at the moment) to measure happiness or effectiveness with anything approaching precision, the critics may well be right in some cases. But who cares? There will still be a marked increase in the supply of what is best. But my second answer is that I don't think the critics are generally right. My recommendation is not that you duplicate exactly what it is that you are doing today that is in the 20 percent yielding 80 percent. The point of examining the common characteristics of your happiness and achievement islands is to isolate something far more basic than what has happened: to isolate what you are uniquely programmed to do best. It may well be that there are things you should be doing (to realize your full potential achievement or happiness) that you have only started doing imperfectly, to some degree, or even that you have not started to do at all. For example, Dick Francis was a superb National Hunt jockey, but did not publish his first racing mystery until he was nearly 40. Now his success, money earned, and possibly personal satisfaction from the latter activity far exceed those from the former. Richard Adams was an unfulfilled, middle-aged, middle-level civil servant before he wrote the best-seller Watership Down. It is not at all uncommon for analysis of happiness or achievement islands to yield insight into what individuals are best at, and what is best for them, which then enables them to spend time on totally new activities that have a higher ratio of reward to time than anything they were doing before. There can, therefore, be increasing returns as well as the possibility of diminishing returns. In fact, one thing you should specifically consider is a change of career and/or lifestyle. Your basic objective, when you have identified both the type, differentities and the general type of activity that take 20 percent of your time but yield 80 percent of happiness or achievement, should be to increase the 20 percent of time spent on those and similar activities by as much as possible. A short-term objective, usually feasible, is to decide to take the 20 percent of time spent on the high-value activities up to 40 percent within a year. This one act will tend to raise your "productivity" by between 60 and 80 percent. (You will now have two lots of 80 percent of output, from two lots of 20 percent of time, so your total output would go from 100 to 160 even if you forfeited all the previous 20 from low-value activities in reallocating some of the time to the high-value activities!) The ideal position is to move the time spent on high-value activities up from 20 to 100 percent. This may only be possible by changing career and lifestyle. If so, make a plan, with deadlines for how you are going to make these changes. Eliminate or reduce the low-value activities For the 80 percent of activities that give you only 20 percent of results, the ideal is to eliminate them. You may need to do this before allocating more time to the high-value activities (although people often find that firing themselves up to spend more time on the high-value activities is a more efficient way of forcing them to set aside the low-value time sinks). First reactions are often that there is little scope for escaping from low-value activities. They are said to be inevitable parts of family, social, or work obligations. If you find yourself thinking this, think again. There is normally great scope to do things differently within your existing circumstances. Remember the advice above: be unconventional and eccentric in how you use your time. Do not follow the herd. Try your new policy and see what happens. Since there is little value in the activities you want to displace, people may not actually notice if you stop doing them. Even if they do notice, they may not care enough to force you to do them if they can see that this would take major effort on their part. But even if dropping the low-value activities does require a radical change in circumstances—a new job, a new career, new friends, even a new lifestyle or partner—form a plan to make the desired changes. The alternative is that your potential for achievement and happiness will never be attained. FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS OF ECCENTRIC AND EFFECTIVE TIME USE My first illustration is William Ewart Gladstone, the dominant liberal statesman of Victorian England who was elected prime minister four times. Gladstone was eccentric in many ways, not least his spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to rescue “fallen women” from prostitution and his not totally unrelated bouts of self-flagellation; but his use of time is the eccentricity on which we shall focus here. Gladstone was not constrained by his political duties, or, rather, was effective at them because he spent his time pretty much as he pleased in an amazing variety of ways. He was an inveterate tourist, both in the British Isles and overseas, often slipping over to France, Italy, or Germany on private business while prime minister. He loved the theater, pursued several (almost certainly non-physical) affairs with women, read avidly (20,000 books in his lifetime), made incredibly long speeches in the House of Commons (which despite their length were apparently compulsive listening), and virtually invented the sport of modern election-eeting, which he pursued with enormous gusto and enjoyment. Whenever he felt even slightly ill, he would go to bed for at least a whole day, where he would read and think. His enormous political energy and effectiveness derived from his eccentric use of time. Of subsequent British prime ministers, only Lloyd George, Churchill, and Thatcher came anywhere near to rivaling Gladstone's eccentric use of time; and all three were unusually effective. Three highly eccentric management consultants The other examples of unconventional time management come from the staid world of management consulting. Consultants are notorious for long hours and frenetic activity. My three characters, all of whom I knew quite well, broke all the conventions. They were also all spectacularly successful. The first, whom I will call Fred, made tens of millions of dollars from being a consultant. He never bothered to go to business school, but managed to set up a very large and successful firm of consultants where almost everyone else worked 70 or more hours a week. Fred visited the office occasionally and chaired partners' meetings once a month, which partners from all over the globe were compelled to attend, but preferred to spend his time playing tennis and thinking. He ruled the firm with an iron fist but never raised his voice. Fred controlled everything through an alliance with his five main subordinates. The second, alias Randy, was one of these lieutenants. Apart from its founder, he was virtually the only exception to the work-aholic culture of the firm. He had himself posted to a far-distant country, where he ran a thriving and rapidly growing office, also staffed by people working unbelievably hard, largely from his home. Nobody knew how Randy spent his time or how few hours he worked, but he was incredibly laid back. Randy would only attend the most important client meetings, delegating everything else to junior partners and if necessary inventing the most bizarre reasons why he could not be there. Although head of the office, Randy paid zero attention to any administrative matters. His whole energy was spent working out how to increase revenues with the most important clients and then putting mechanisms in place to do this with the least personal effort. Randy never had more than three priorities and often only everything else went by the board. Randy was impossibly everything to work for, but wonderfully effective. My third and final eccentric time user was a friend and part-call him Jim. My abiding memory of Jim is of when we affice, together with a handful of other colleagues. cramped and full of wild activity: people talking on the rushing round to get presentations done, shouting from office to the other. But there was Jim, an oasis of calm inactivity, staring thought-calendar, working out what to do. Occasionally, he takes aside to the one quiet room and explain he wanted everyone to do: not once, not twice, but life-threateningly tedious detail. Jim would then repeat back to him what they were going to do. was slow, languid, and half-deaf. But he was a terrific leader. He spent all his time working out which tasks were high value should do them and then ensuring that they got done. THE TOP 10 LOW-VALUE USES OF TIME You can only spend time on high-value activities (whether for achievement or enjoyment) if you have abandoned low-value actvities. I invited you above to identify your low-value time sinks. that you have not missed some, a list below gives the 10 are most common. But these activities. Under no circumstances give everyone a fair share of your time. Above all, don't just because people ask, or because you receive a call or a fax. Follow Nancy Reagan's advice (in another context) Just Say No!—or treat the matter with what Lord called "a complete ignored." The Top 10 low-value uses of time 1 Things other people want you to do 2 Things that have been always done this way 3 Things you're not unusually good at doing 4 Things you don't enjoy doing 5 Things that are always interrupted in 6 Things few other people are interested in 7 Things that have already taken twice as long as you originally expected 8 Things where your collaborators are unreliable or low quality 9 Things that have a predictable cycle 10 Answering the telephone THE TOP 10 HIGHEST-VALUE USES OF TIME A second list gives the other side of the coin. The Top 10 highest-value uses of time 1 Things that advance your overall purpose in life 2 Things you have always wanted to do 3 Things already in the 20/80 relationship of time to results 4 Innovative ways of doing things that promise to slash the time required and/or multiply the quality of results 5 Things other people tell you can't be done 6 Things other people have done successfully in a different arena 7 Things that use your own creativity 8 Things that you can get other people to do for you with relatively little effort on your part 9 Anything with high-quality collaborators who have already transcended the 80/20 rule of time, who use time eccentrically and effectively 10 Things for which it is now or never When thinking about any potential use of time, ask two questions: • Is it unconventional? • Does it promise to multiply effectiveness? It is unlikely to be a good use of time unless the answer to both questions is yes. IS A TIME REVOLUTION FEASIBLE? Many of you may feel that much of my advice is rather revolutionary and pie in the sky for your circumstances. Comments and criticisms that have been made to me include the following: I can’t choose how to spend my time. My bosses won’t allow it. I would need to change jobs to follow your advice and I can’t afford the risk. This advice is all very well for the rich, but I just don’t have that degree of freedom. I’d have to divorce my spouse! My ambition is to improve my effectiveness 25 percent, not 250 percent. I just don’t believe the latter can be done. If it were as easy as you say, everyone would do it. If you find yourself saying any of these things, time revolution may not be for you. Don’t start a time revolution unless you are willing to be a revolutionary I could encapsulate (or at least caricature) these responses as follows: “I’m not a radical, let alone a revolutionary, so leave me alone. I’m basically happy with my existing horizons.” Fair enough. Revolution is revolution. It is uncomfortable, wrenching, and dangerous. Before you start a revolution, realize that it will involve major risks and will lead you into uncharted territory. Those who want a time revolution need to link together their past, present, and future, as suggested above by Figure 35. Behind the issue of how we allocate time lurks the even more fundamental issue of what we want to get out of our lives.
